Improving Education Environment for Socially Disadvantaged Families Through ICT-Enabled Social Innovation: The Case of Papinotas

The paper starts with an overview of the current debate on social innovation, highlighting it as a key element one of a new innovation paradigm. It presents the objectives, the concept and the main empirical results of the global research project SI-DRIVE – Social Innovation: Driving Force of Social Change, which intends to extend knowledge about social innovation by integrating theories and research methodologies. In this regard, one important goal is to contribute to better understanding the relationship to technological innovation as well as to economic value creation. The paper analyzes one of the cases mapped in SI-DRIVE’s global survey on social innovation initiatives, the Chilean company Papinotas, which focuses on improving education environment for deprived families. Children from such families with low-income background are usually excluded from Chile’s private high-quality education and have no other choice but to attend public schools, characterized by poor quality of organization and communication between schoolteachers and parents, thus causing low levels of attendance and performance. Papinotas offers an online platform for teachers for sending text messages directly to parents’ mobile phones in order to achieve better flow of information between teachers and parents and to promote a more favorable environment for education. The case of Papinotas shows how creation of social value can be successfully combined with economic value creation through introduction of a new social practice and reveals how quite simple technologies can facilitate social innovations in order to improve communication between teachers and parents, leading to better attendance and performance by students.